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Tag: Marlene Dietrich

Last nights’ post break-up vodka festival has sucked all the moisture from my major organs. There’s a desert in my mouth. Can’t move. Too soon to test the efficiency of any limbs. Can’t form any plan yet to slake pernicious thirst. Becoming aware that arm has a pins and needles sensation. Obviously been sleeping on it. Arm should have had better sense than to get rolled on by drunken, leaden, vodka soaked torso in the middle of the night. Have no sympathy for arm.

The sunrise knocks at my window. It’s an urgent knock. Like it has lost it’s key and really wants to come in. I open one eye. Decide sunrise can wait. Sunrise can just come back later when it has better manners. Eyes have only been shut for a couple of hours and eyes have been crying well into the night so eyes are raw like the sandman had given them a good sandpapering, then a good shellacking, then another good sandpapering. I think Sandman has actually been preparing to stain a roll top desk rather than sprinkling gentle somnambulant grains on my peepers.

The sun is well up in the sky when I wake again. Sun says I thought I’d get on with things without you since you didn’t get up to let me in. I call Sun arrogant bastard, say it can do whatever it bloody well likes just so long as it doesn’t bother me again. Sun harrumphs and says it will do just that; that there are lots of other people that appreciate his beautiful day and I can just stew in morose darkness. Fine with me I say.

Decide that the desert in my mouth is the Sahara. Hmmm… cliché. Choose another desert, a less well-known desert. The Mojave? The Gobi? Those are the only other deserts I can name this morning. Well, let’s make it the Sahara then. Conjure endless, rolling, majestic dunes to mind…. SUDDENLY… through the heat haze… the French Foreign Legion march into view. Soundtrack swells. All colour leaches from the image. We’re in black and white now. We’re in the film Morocco. Made in 1930. The film that made Marlene Dietrich famous for wearing a man’s dress suit.

The French Foreign Legion is getting closer now. They must be thirsty too. What on earth would compel them to march across the Sahara desert in the middle of the day? Could they not have hired a camel train? Do they have sunscreen? The peaks on those little kepi hats aren’t really effective against the arrogant bastard sun.

As they come yet closer, I call out. ‘Gary!’ Gary ignores me. The Gary is Gary Cooper. I’ve never thought him much of an actor but the camera loves him. He knows how to wear a French Foreign Legion uniform, I’ll give him that.

I call again, ‘Gaz! Do you wanna come to the pub? I’m feeling a bit shit, I just broke up with…..well, you know blah, blah blah.’

Gary calls back, ‘I can’t, I’ve got some more marching to do, then I’m meeting up with Marlene later.’

‘Are you wearing sunscreen?’ I shout. ‘The sun’s a bastard, and there’s a big hole in the ozone layer.’

‘No,’ he shouts back, ‘It hasn’t been invented yet.’ He momentarily breaks step. ‘There’s a hole in the what?!’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll explain it later.’

The Saharan sand is hot. Hot in a stupid molten way that is about to make my feet burst into flames. I think…If only there was an oasis offering pedicures and Long Island iced tea… Oh look, there’s one. A little bit of self-care is exactly what I need after my emotional night.

I ring the bell at the front desk of the oasis. A dusky, bejewelled woman – let’s call her Fatima – shows me to a foot spa and helps me pick out a colour for my toes.

‘What are you doing on the weekend?’ Fatima asks.

‘Not much,’ I reply. ‘I’ve just broken up with someone so I’m a bit sad, probably just stay home and watch Game of Thrones or something.’

‘Oh, she says, you should buy a new pair of shoes, put some lippie on and go out. The French Foreign Legion’s in town. Those boys go off, you know.’

‘Yeah, I just ran into Gary, but he said he’s catching up with Marlene later.’

‘I dunno what he sees in her’, says Fatima. ‘You know, at the end of this film, she throws away her shoes and follows the Legion across the infinite, stinking hot dunes.’

‘I know?!!!’ I exclaim. ‘Is she mental? That sand is freakin’ hot! What is she thinking, following some dude across this incredibly cinematic yet largely inhospitable topography?’

‘It’s Marlene, you know how she likes a grand gesture,’ offers Fatima.

‘Yeah, well we’re in a film, I guess that’s what you do for love in a film,’ I sigh.

I lie back in my massage chair while Fatima paints my toes Mecca Gold. The pins and needles in my arm are subsiding now.

‘Is there a shoe shop around here?’ I ask Fatima.

‘Of course,’ she says, ‘Just over that dune, turn right at the angry camel.’

I try on every shoe in the store before settling on an open toed lace up Cuban heeled clog by Jeffrey Campbell that shows off Fatima’s fine work.

Then I put on some lippie as per Fatima’s excellent advice and pop into the medina for a refreshing beverage. I enter the funky coldness of a smart bar. I see a man through the arch silhouetted by the candlelight from the gently swinging lanterns. It’s Gary. He’s slumped over the bar, crying into his mint tea.

‘What’s going on, Gaz?’ I say. ‘Where’s Marlene?’

‘She’s busy with Adolphe Menjou.’ moans Gary.

‘Oh. Sorry. It’ll all turn out alright,’ I say.

‘How do you know?’ asks Gary.

‘I just know.’

‘Have you seen the end of this film?’ presses Gary.

‘No, of course not,’ I lie. Then in an effort to distract him I say, ‘Look at my new shoes.’

‘Nice,’ he says, ‘No good for marching though.’

‘I don’t intend to do any marching,’ I say. ‘They’re my break up band-aid shoes. I’m going home to watch Game of Thrones this weekend in them.’

‘I don’t know what that is,’ says Gary. ‘Don’t you wanna go out? I could introduce you to the rest of my regiment.’

‘No thanks,’ I say, ‘I’ve had enough of unavailable men. And the whole marching obsession thing you’ve all got going on is a bit weird.’

‘Fair enough,’ says Gary.

‘I’d better be off,’ I say, ‘Will you be alright?’

‘Well, I thought I’d mope for a bit longer, then see if I can hook up with a belly dancer.’

‘Don’t bother with the belly dancer, Gaz. Marlene will be back later. Her and Adolphe won’t last.

‘Are you sure you haven’t seen the end of this film?’ he asks.

‘Trust me’, I call back over my shoulder, ‘Love always works out in films.’

Cue final sequence:

Shot of the Saharan dunes framed through an ornate Moroccan archway. The French Foreign Legion march in formation toward vanishing point. Suddenly Marlene! A moment of decision. She tries to run but the damn sand! She stops. Takes off her shoes. Flings them aside, and with them her past, her history and all the doubts she had had about Gary. She catches up to the back of the regiment, joining the other camp followers that have given up everything to follow the Legion to God knows where.

We watch until the endless rolling majestic dunes swallow them all. Soundtrack swells. The End.